Philomena Lee: A mother's journey

She is a suburban retiree now, her kindly face creased with all the cares of 80 years. But in Philomena Lee’s twinkling eyes and lilting brogue, it is easy to see and hear the fetching lass she was six decades ago — when she lost her youth to a handsome boy at an Irish carnival, and then their baby son to the Catholic Church, which forced her to give him up for adoption by an American family.

That son grew up to become a consummate Washington insider — chief counsel to the Republican National Committee. And Lee, the real-life woman behind the hit movie “Philomena,” made her first visit to the capital the other day, to see where her son lived and worked, and to lobby on behalf of tens of thousands of other similarly separated mothers and children whose efforts to find each other have been stymied by Ireland’s secret adoption rules.

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“It’s not so much I’m angry,” Lee said in an interview in a quiet corner of the Ritz-Carlton’s lobby bar in the West End, when asked how she seemed to harbor no bitterness at her fate. “But so sad. So sad.”

Lee was just 18 and unmarried when she gave birth to her son, Anthony, at Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea, Tipperary, Ireland in 1952. Three and a half years later, she watched in horror as he was driven away by a family from St. Louis. She would go on to marry, have two other children and spend 30 years as a psychiatric nurse in England. But she never saw her son again. He was renamed Michael Anthony Hess, graduated from Notre Dame and George Washington University Law School and spent 15 years as a lawyer for the Republican Party before dying of AIDS in 1995.

Now Lee and her daughter, Jane Libberton, in league with an Irish organization called the Adoption Rights Alliance, have founded what they call “The Philomena Project,” an effort to pressure the Irish government to open sealed adoption records to mothers and children seeking to find each other. Lee’s own effort to reconnect with her son spanned decades, but took on renewed intensity just over a decade ago when she first told her other children of Anthony’s existence, and Libberton offered to try to find him. With the help of the British journalist Martin Sixsmith, who wrote a novelistic account of the search on which the movie is based, they ultimately tracked down details about his life in the United States. But by then his ashes had already been buried for nine years in a cemetery on the grounds of the abbey where he had been born — sent there at his request. He had been looking for his mother for years, but the nuns never told either mother or son of the other’s quest.

“The movie has touched so many people,” said Libberton, who noted that the Philomena Project had just begun trying to raise money and awareness. “So many people have reached out. They just want some tiny bit of information.”

In Britain, adopted children may seek out their birth parents once they turn 18, so Libberton was stunned to learn that is not the case in Ireland, where the government relied for decades on the Catholic Church to shelter unwed mothers, who were compelled to labor at convent laundries and other jobs, and coerced into giving their children up for adoption to American families in exchange for generous contributions to the church. Some separated families have been matched through a fledgling computer registry, but the system is flawed and little publicized, said Mari Steed, the American representative of the Adoption Rights Alliance, who made the rounds on Capitol Hill with Lee and Libberton last week.

“The only bright spot is that all the records have in fact been turned over by the church to the government,” added Steed, who was herself adopted from Ireland and eventually reunited with her birth mother after a 15-year quest. But the records are incomplete, and pending legislation that would make the adoption process more open would not be retroactive.

Lee visited Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), among other lawmakers, to press her cause. Speaking to reporters afterward, McCaskill noted that her own stepchildren are adopted, and that one had reconnected with his birth mother, “so I know firsthand how important it is to keep those doors open.” She said she would consider sponsoring a Senate resolution or formal letter of protest on the issue, and would raise it during the confirmation process for the next American ambassador to Ireland.

Lee and Libberton’s stop in Washington was part of a whirlwind tour to promote the movie (which has been nominated for an Academy Award for best picture) that will culminate at the Oscar ceremony in Los Angeles on March 2. Though the movie depicts Lee as having come to Washington in search of her son, this was actually her first visit, and she was looking forward to sightseeing and perhaps getting together with one or two of his old friends. She acknowledged that after she learned his fate, she was at first reluctant to have her story told in public.

“I thought about it and thought about it,” she recalled, “and I said that the thing was it might help other women. We were so ostracized because we’d committed a mortal sin. It was really hammered into you.”

At this Libberton quietly interjected, “You’re still struggling with it being out there, aren’t you?”